Never trust anyone in business; not even your own father.
Business is business.
According to Mackay, the lesson stuck. He went on to write:Since then, I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that any business arrangement I’m involved in is backed up with yards of paper that describe exactly who does what and what happens if they don’t. Understandings prevent misunderstandings. Banisters are great teaching devices.
Like Dietrich, Peale, and Mackay, you may recall a moment from your past when the words of another person so affected your thinking that you were given a whole philosophy—to recall Dietrich’s lovely phrase—or at least an invaluable new perspective to help guide you through life. I can still recall—with great clarity, in fact—a number of inspiring things my high school guidance counselor, Mr. Critchfield Krug, said to me after I had lost my way as a teenager. Some became mantras for me, including a saying I first heard from him:
Never be satisfied with less than your best.
For many people, profound and life-altering admonitions have been found in the pages of a book written by someone who died centuries earlier. For Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, such a book was a 1647 work written by Baltasar Gracián. Gracián was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest who often ran afoul of his Jesuit superiors because of his “worldly” interests. His most popular work is now well known as The Art of Worldly Wisdom, but for more than two hundred years after its publication it was known only by its Spanish title: Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Oracle, a Manual of the Art of Discretion). In the mid–1800s, Arthur Schopenauer fell in love with the book, ultimately translating it into German in 1861. A couple of years later, Friedrich Nietzsche—a young Schopenhauer fan—got hold of the German version of The Oracle. His curiosity must have been piqued when he read Schopenhauer’s glowing endorsement: “Absolutely unique . . . a book made for constant use—a companion for life.” From the moment Nietzsche began paging through the book, he was riveted. A few years later he wrote about it: “Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety.”
When one reads The Art of Worldly Wisdom today, it’s easy to understand why Gracián’s 1647 book had such great appeal to these two intellectual giants. In his presentation of 300 principles about living honorably and effectively, Gracián covered almost every aspect of life, including such predictable problems as insecure superiors, foolish colleagues, and enemies with malevolent motives. Even though The Art of Worldly Wisdom is often called “a book of maxims,” it is clear that the author viewed it as more of a rulebook for living. In laying out his rules, Gracián often spoke exhortatively:
Always act as if others were watching.
Always hold in reserve recourse to something better.
Always have your mouth full of sugar to sweeten your words,
so that even your ill-wishers enjoy them.
If there is too much display today there will be nothing to show tomorrow.
Always have some novelty with which to dazzle.
But it was when Gracián expressed his rules dehortatively that they packed the most punch:
Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.
Never share your secrets with those greater than you.
Never exaggerate. Exaggeration is a species of lying.
Never do anything when you are in a temper,
for you will do everything wrong.
Never risk your reputation on a single shot,
for if you miss the loss is irreparable.
Never open the door to a lesser evil,
for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
For nearly half a century, I’ve been keeping—and progressively updating—a collection of quotations that remind me of important principles to guide my life. I originally copied them on 3-by-5-inch index cards that I tacked up on walls and bulletin boards, but I eventually transferred them to a computer file that I designated Words to Live By. There are several thousand quotations in my current WTLB file. All figures of speech are represented, including numerous neverisms from such influential thinkers as Albert Einstein:
Never regard study as a duty.
Never do anything against conscience
even if the state demands it.
Never lose a holy curiosity.
The phrasing of this last quotation has always appealed to me, for it suggests an almost religious reverence that Einstein had for open-mindedly exploring every aspect of life. The remark came at the end of a fuller passage that went this way:One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Some of the most important words in my WTLB collection have come not from great thinkers or philosophers, but from classic works of fiction:
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.
These words, from William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847 classic Vanity Fair, are part of a passage that is still worth reading today, a century and a half after it was first written. In a comparison of the gentle and kindly Mrs. Bute Crawley and the contemptuous and ill-mannered Rawdon Crawley, the narrator says:The different conduct of these two people is pointed out respectfully to the attention of persons commencing the world. Praise everybody, I say to such; never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man’s face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.
While the quotations to be found in this chapter may be viewed as examples of advice, it is my belief that they go beyond advice per se and enter into the realm of what used to be called pearls of wisdom. In the next chapter, we’ll turn our attention to advice-only admonitions, but in the remainder of this chapter we’ll continue looking at those that can best be described as words to live by.
Never do harm, and whenever possible do good.ISABEL ALLENDE, from her 2008
memoir The Sum of Our Days
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you
that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.MARCUS AURELIUS
This was an entry in the diary of the most philosophically inclined of all Roman emperors. The personal journal of Marcus Aurelius was discovered after his death at age fifty-eight in A.D. 180, and eventually published under the title Meditations. It went on to become one of history’s most influential books, and almost every world leader has had at least a passing acquaintance with it. It also contains this admonition:
Never let the future disturb you.
You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons
of reason which today arm you against the present.
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.J. M. BARRIE, in a 1922 speech
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life.EDWARD L. BERNAYS, quoted in Are You Happy?,
a 1986 book by Dennis Wholey
When I first came upon this sentiment, I was struck by the intriguing choice of words. But it was only after reading the entire observation that I realized how masterfully Bernays—the father of public relations—had expressed the danger of “either-or” thinking when applied to work and play. Here’s the entire observation (which, by the way, is commonly misattributed to Pablo Picasso):Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.